trk

Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)... Anything that can't be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.

How do you quantify "style"? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers "worth" more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?

Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It's fair and it's removed from any bias.

The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn't be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.

So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.

10 years / 250,000k just announced by MG in Australia - including electric vehicles (and thus batteries)... Not bad considering the anti-EV crowd are always declaring battery packs to have a 3 year lifespan!

MG has introduced the longest factory warranty ever offered by a new-car maker in Australia – 10 years or 250,000km, whichever comes first – five years after rolling out seven years of coverage across its line-up.

And unlike Mitsubishi – which in October 2020 became the first brand to market a 10-year warranty, but with only a 200,000km distance limit – there is no mention of a requirement for customers to have their car serviced within the MG dealer network to access the full decade of coverage.

While MG’s new 10-year warranty is longer in time – compared to its previous seven-year offer – it now has a distance cap of 250,000km, rather than unlimited.

In effect from today (1 August 2024) for all newly-registered petrol, hybrid and electric MG models, the new warranty applies to vehicles not deemed to be "commercial use" – such as Ubers, taxis, food delivery couriers and driving schools.

I've had YouTube Music since it was Google Music, but the price has recently doubled and at the same time I've started noticing my "Radio" keeps playing the same dozen songs over and over again. Started to feel like I was listening to Triple M.

Yesterday was the final straw as every song played on repeat until you manually skipped which is just... wtf? How does that even happen?

I have jumped on to Spotify for the minute, but find it is too heavily focused on "pop" music - it seems to choose songs that are broadly more popular, but aren't really the same as what I'm choosing to play. I somehow always end up back with top 50 chart artists in the queue, even if I started on like bluegrass or hillbilly or something. Also if I select a song or artist and choose "Radio", it always the same 50 songs and then just stops which doesn't seem like what "Radio" should be at all.

What other options are there that are accessible from Australia, and preferably have a decent amount of Australian local content? I have zero interests in podcasts being jammed in, I just want music. And preferably music that I can just say "play stuff that sounds like this" and it'll go on a deep dive to focus on things I haven't heard before.

Critical:

• No ads
• Able to actually choose the music and skip and what not, so not Sirius or similar
• Good catalogue of Australian artists
• Android and Desktop clients
• "Family" plan or similar for 2 people

Budget not really an issue.

Qantas is investigating reports of customers having access to other passengers' information on their app.

In a statement issued this morning, the airline said it would provide more information as soon as possible.

"Qantas is investigating reports of an issue impacting the Qantas app this morning," a spokesperson for their airline said.

The scale of the issue has not yet been confirmed.

Luckily I can't afford to travel anywhere so this won't affect me, but probably will others.

The report found a key cause of the outage was a problem with Optus's 3G network.

During the outage, Optus's 4G and 5G towers shut down, meaning emergency calls were diverted to other network's towers — known as camping on.

But the network's 3G base towers did not shut down, so those calls got lost along the way.

"Some devices … attempted to make emergency calls via those [3G] towers (rather than look to camp on to another network), even though no mobile service was being supplied by the Optus network," the report said.

...

The recommendations include:

• Obligate telcos to shut down their towers during outages, allowing triple-0 calls to be carried by other networks
• Establish a "Triple Zero custodian" whose sole responsible is to make sure the system is working
• Force telcos to share real-time information about outages with emergency services organisations and authorities
• Force telcos to file a timely post-mortem on major outages to the regulator and the government — including what caused it and steps being taken to resolve it, with a clear and detailed timeline
• Review the government's contract with Telstra to run the triple-0 system, with any changes to be made within a year
• Introduce an industry-wide approach to responding to consumers affected by large-scale outages
• Establish an agreement between telcos requiring them to help each to manage and resolve outages
• Review all legislation and regulation relating to triple-0

Feels bad man

A man is in custody after at least four people were injured in an alleged stabbing incident at a church in Sydney's south-west on Monday night.

Keen for recommendations of similar bands. Dunno what they specific genre is, but I do like when the guitars fanging have a bit of a melody laid over the top.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doop_(song)

"Doop" is a song by Dutch Eurodance group Doop. It was released on 28 February 1994 as the first single from their debut album, Circus Doop (1994). The song consists of a Charleston-based big band number set against a house backing track. "Doop" achieved success in several countries, including the United Kingdom, where it spent three weeks atop the UK Singles Chart. Two main versions (each with its own corresponding radio edit) were issued under the names of two different big bands, with the "Urge 2 Merge radio mix" combining sections of both. In 2005, the song was covered by Looney Tunez vs. Doop.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing_(song)

"Swamp Thing" is a song by British electronic music group the Grid, released on 23 May 1994 as a single and is included on the Grid's third album, Evolver (1994). It peaked at number three on the UK, Australian, and Danish singles charts and reached the top five in an additional seven countries, including Finland and Norway, where it reached number two. The song was later sampled in "Banjo Thing" by Infernal and "Swamp Thing" by Pegboard Nerds. NME magazine ranked it number 41 in their list of the 50 best songs of 1994.

"Swamp Thing" is almost completely instrumental, consisting mainly of: drums, synthesizer sounds and banjo. The only vocals are Well alright, watch out, Feel alright and I just dig it, sampled from the 1973 reggae song "Papa Do It Sweet" by Lloyd & Patsy. The banjo part was written and performed by Roger Dinsdale – a folk musician who also played the guitar and the mandolin. Dinsdale died in July 2009.

This is a cover, bit I prefer it to the original artist. Knowing the backstory makes the song physically hurt I reckon.

From Wiki:

"Scorn Not His Simplicity" is a song written by the Irish musician and songwriter Phil Coulter

Phil Coulter's first son was born with Down syndrome, and several months later the father wrote the song "Scorn Not His Simplicity" about his experiences with his son's disorder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorn_Not_His_Simplicity